This, from Bill Simmons’ article on ESPN.com’s Page 2, Sports’ two most intriguing words: What if? (hilarious part in black):

What if Memphis landed LeBron instead of Cleveland?

Take a trip back to the 2003 lottery with me.

We’re down to the final two teams. If Memphis draws the No. 2 pick, it goes to Detroit because of the stupid Otis Thorpe trade the Grizzlies made five years before. If the Griz draw No. 1, they get LeBron. Arguably, it’s the greatest hit-or-miss moment in the history of professional sports — like going on “Deal or No Deal,” getting down to two suitcases and having a 50/50 chance of winning $500 million. For a few seconds, the cameras show Jerry West, who has the same look on his face Forrest Gump had when he was hooking up with Jenny for the first time. If he had dropped dead right then, nobody would have been surprised.

Well, we know how it turned out: Cleveland got the pick, Memphis got nothing, and eventually, a heartbroken West retired and disappeared off the face of the earth, presumably to spend the next few years playing Russian roulette in Southeast Asia like Chris Walken in “The Deer Hunter.” (Sorry to throw consecutive movie references at you, but the situation demanded two of them and that’s that.) Now look at this domino effect over the next five years if Memphis gets that pick:

A. Bron-Bron joins a deep Grizzlies team good enough to win 50 games that season without him. Better than starting out on a lottery team with Ricky Davis and Darius Miles, right?

B. Picking second, Cleveland takes Carmelo and builds around him and Boozer. Since Denver’s Kiki Vandweghe took Nikoloz Tskitishvili over Amare Stoudemire in 2002, it goes without saying Kiki would have been dumb enough to take Darko at No. 3 over Chris Bosh. The rest of the draft probably unfolds the same way, although Chad Ford still has Macij Lampe going No. 9 to the Knicks.

C. What are the odds LeBron stays in Memphis after his rookie contract ends? I’m going with between 0.000001 and 0.009 percent. And that might be high. That means he would have become a free agent following the 2007 season, leading to the following sub-headings:

C-1. At least eight to 10 teams would have spent the ’06 and ’07 seasons carving out enough cap space to make a serious run at LeBron.

C-2. You would have read roughly 200 billion words and heard nearly 200 billion words uttered about the previous paragraph. And that’s a conservative estimate.

C-3. There’s a good chance Marc Stein’s head would have exploded at some point from following 35 hot LeBron rumors at once. If it happened on the “Coast To Coast” show on ESPN2 in HD, even better.

C-4. There’s no way Isiah would have planned ahead to LeBron being available in ’07, inadvertently knocking New York out of the LeBron Sweepstakes and leading to a summer of rioting in the streets of Manhattan the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ’77 blackout and the Son of Sam murders.

C-5. Jersey would have cut ties with Vince Carter, dealt J-Kidd for cap space and carved out enough room to reunite Bron-Bron with his buddy Jay-Z as the star of the Soon-to-Be Brooklyn Nets. Meanwhile, Orlando would have been throwing Rashard Lewis’ money at him and offering him the chance to play with Dwight Howard for the next 10 seasons. Soon-to-Be-Brooklyn and Jay-Z … or Orlando and D-Ho? Hmmmmm.

C-6. LeBron’s departure swiftly kills basketball in Memphis, leading to the Grizzlies eventually moving to England and becoming the London Hooligans. Actually, that could happen anyway.

Final note: In two years, the Soon-To-Be Brooklyn piece of Scenario C-5 could end up being realized. (Sorry, Cleveland. You know it might be coming.) As for everything else in the LeBron/Memphis scenario, it remains the greatest NBA “What If?” of the decade. The good news? We still have 20 months to top it.

Related posts:
Simmons on the death of the Seven Seconds or Less era
Bill Simmons on Bryan Colangelo
“On six, Gold Medal!”
Rockets hit 21 in a row, Heat sit at 11…total.
The anticipation is killing me.

Tags: NBA